Landover BBS - Commodore 128 & PET - since 1987

Is Ray Carlsen a member here (or could you PM me his email address)?  I live in Maine (USA) and it would be GREAT to have a contact that fixes Commodore stuff!--I notice in my last post about my broken 1571 drive that you had mentioned he fixes those as well...(!)  Hope he's not too far from me...

As for the C128 itself, I'll probably hold off on sending it to Ray until I first acquire another working system that will hopefully help me isolate the problem with my current one.

Been awhile since I last posted--I think I was trying to get some help fixing a faulty 1571 drive, then my one last working 1541 drive bit the dust.  This was immediately after I had moved my entire C128 setup to my "summer retreat" where I was really looking forward to getting back into a programming project.  So I was really bummed out; not being able to load any games or save any programs makes a C128 rather useless, huh? (maybe I should have resorted to the Datasette!)  Anyway, after leaving the C128 unattended in it's new location for a few months, something even worse happened... I went to turn it on just to make sure it was still ok (I guess I must have had a bad hunch) and for the first time, it no longer powers on!  I'm really not sure what could have caused this--exposure to humidity perhaps?  The room was not air-conditioned and occasionally got rather warm that summer.  And I didn't take it out until Fall where it was getting fairly cold in that room at night.  Normally I wouldn't be too concerned with this, especially where it wasn't ever in use any of that time.  God knows how many excruciatingly hot summer days with nasty humidity my equipment has seen over the years, where it was 95+ degrees upstairs in my bedroom where the C128 normally resides... never a problem before--I'd just usually wait for more comfortable atmospheric conditions before putting my equipment into regular use.  Maybe I should have let the C128 climatize in a warmer environment for a bit before testing it that one day.

Anyway, I was hoping it might be the fuse in the power supply--I seem to remember the C128 not powering up when I first got it until I switched out the fuse.  Well, the fuse looked alright, I brought it down to the shop anyway, they tested it and told me it was still good.  So perhaps the power supply is just dead?

I guess my question to you guys would be: given the fact it was in idle storage in hot/humid conditions for a couple months and now just doesn't work, is it more likely that the C128 itself has bit the dust, or perhaps just the power supply??

Thanks guys.

OPEN 15,8,15,"I0:":CLOSE 15

Tried that command in both C128/C64 mode--the drive makes those quick clicking noises and then just flashes green continuously (like before).  I am still unable to read the directory or access any files.  Also I noticed that I can't hear the disk spinning inside the drive (as compared to my 1541 drive)--I only hear the initial click sounds.  I wonder if the mechanism is misaligned or broken.  Especially after reading article 429 about how it can be damaged easily in transit.  Another weird thing I noticed is that the drive attempts to spin up (or makes some kind of noise) when I insert a disk even just part way into the drive--also it makes this noise when I remove the disk from the drive (which seemed especially odd)--is this normal for a 1571 drive??

Seems in any case I'm going to have to open this thing up, which I am not looking forward to. 

 

Another possibility is that the 1571 has the old DOS ROM.  If so, the old ROM will have a hard time figuring out 1541 single-sided mode and 1571 double-sided mode.  It will become confused and give confused/corrupted directories.  To correct the problem, you'd have to put in a newer, upgrade ROM or JiffyDOS.

What was the old DOS ROM used for?--was this so that the 1571 could be used on older CBM machines or even old PC MS-DOS machines?  Just seems strange to me that the drive would have a ROM that was incompatible with it's native system/disks...

Ok, guess I was WAY OFF--no surprise really!  Thanks for taking the time to explain it all.  That really clears things up.

Yeah, you are in for a lot of working getting a bitmap program working on the C64.  In my opinion, the only practical ways to do this are with a BASIC language extension or by writing the program in assembly language.

Hmm, I'm starting to see that now...  didn't think it would be this hard comparitively.  Now I know why I got a C128 in the first place!  Maybe I should just stick with BASIC 7 for now...

BSAVE (filename),B15,P57344 TO P65333

That will only save garbage onto disk (actually part of the KERNAL ROM).

Yeah, that's about what it looked like when I tried BLOADing it back in BASIC 7!

If you created your bitmap with GRAPHIC 1 in C128 mode, then you need to set the VIC to hi-res graphics in C64 mode.
 
You should post the code you are using in C64 mode to setup the graphics mode.  That way we can see if things are right.

Yeah, I thought I'd have to set the graphics mode in BASIC 2, only I have no idea how to do it--I merely got the background, border and foreground colors set with POKE statements.  So I don't really have any code worth posting in this regard.  It's okay though--I'm thinking now maybe I should just forget about doing this in BASIC 2 and concentrate on the C128 version.  My BASIC is just not up to snuff for this.  And I had a look at sprite programming in the C64 manual and it was not encouraging! 

Sorry for resurrecting such an old post...  I gave this a shot and actually found it quite useful in reloading graphics I had drawn with a series of DRAW and BOX statements.  The GUI interface I've drawn is so complex that it takes at least 10-15 seconds to render on FAST mode.  But since I've BSAVEd the result of that tedious program, I can BLOAD it back in a split second which is MUCH BETTER!    (not to mention it takes 2 lines of code instead of hundreds)

Now maybe this is a long shot or just a ridiculous question, but is there any way to load this bitmap data in BASIC 2.0 (on a C64)?   I ask because I'd ultimately like to make my program compatible on both machines.  Actually, the only reason I started it in BASIC 7 was for the simplified graphic commands and now that I've got the graphical data stored, I was hoping it might be possible...(?)  though I could not find any mention of BLOAD in the C64 User's Guide...

Ok, got busy for a couple days there but finally got a chance to try this stuff last night.

Ruthven, look at my first post in this thread.  Near the bottom, just above my signature you should see a D64 attached.

Thanks.  I must not have been logged in when I first saw your reply--seems your signature only shows up when I'm logged in.  So I put both Data Becker and PETSpeed to disk and tried them out on my program.  Data Becker produced a working program that was at least twice as fast as the original BASIC program.    Unfortunately PETSpeed didn't work for my program.  It took a while to compile, but when finished it only produced a 4KB "SEQ" type file that wasn't executable.  Maybe it just bugged out and I should try it again--I'm not necessarily surprised that it didn't work with my program, but the BASIC program itself is 37KB so you'd think the compiled file would be more than 4K after all the compiling time/disk access.  Speaking of compiling time, that's an excellent idea using an emulator to really speed up the process.  Actually, I had no idea compiling could take so long--I had only used Blitz! 128 up to this point, and that took about 1 minute to compile my code.  Data Becker took probably about 10-15 minutes and PETSpeed even longer.  And this is a relatively small program.

Anyway, I'm just glad to have a compiler that works with my code.  And it's good to have as many compilers as possible considering how they can be finicky about different things.  Funny how out of the three main compilers mentioned, each of us has success with a different compiler and not the others!  I may find that I have to move on to another compiler as my program progresses, depending on the way I code it.  So I should learn the intricacies of each.

Hey everyone.  Been a while since I've logged on here...my account must have been purged; I needed to re-register.  Though I never left in spirit!   Been side tracked by all sorts of things but I always keep coming back to the Commodore!  Hope everyone is well.

I'm back to working on my synthesizer program that many of you gave me programming advice on a few years back.  Actually, it was interesting for me to go through my old posts as I see that I've come full circle--really, I'm still interested in doing all the things that I had originally planned; incorporating the light pen as a control device and such.  Still haven't picked up any Machine Language yet--actually I was kind of daunted looking at the introduction to ML in the Programmer's Reference Guide.  So for starters, I'd like to see if compiling my BASIC 7 program will give me adequate speed.

But I'm having the same problem as I had when I tried a couple years back.  The compiled program doesn't work properly, only now I think I've narrowed the problem down.  I'm using Blitz! 128 and it will compile really simple programs just fine (like ones that just display a bunch of text on the screen using PRINT).  However, my main program that uses specialized BASIC 7 graphic commands doesn't work when compiled.  I had drawn out a panel using a combination of DRAW and BOX commands.  At the top of the screen I used a CHAR command to display some text, "please wait...loading".  In the compiled program, the text shows up at the top of the screen as it should, but no graphics.  Anyone know why this would be?  Is there another compiler I should use that would translate BASIC 7 commands into their proper ML equivalent?